LAUSD board saves Breakfast in the Classroom

Despite facing criticism from teachers, Los Angeles Unified's Breakfast in the Classroom was spared from elimination on Tuesday as the school board listened to pleas from parents and union members to help keep kids well-nourished in class.

The school board, which plowed through an extraordinarily long agenda, also approved a ban on student suspensions for "willful defiance," saved an aviation mechanics school at Van Nuys Airport and approved a series of school conversions to charters.

Outside the meeting, hundreds of students, teachers and other union members rallied in support of disparate causes.

Breakfast in the Classroom had drawn the ire of United Teachers Los Angeles members, who complained in a union-sponsored survey that the omelets, coffee cake and, especially, the syrup-topped waffles were messy and drew pests to the classroom. Teachers were also upset with the loss of academic time, saying that serving, eating and clean-up cut into the school day.

Superintendent John Deasy called the union's bluff, telling the seven school board members he'd leave it to them to decide whether to eliminate the program, move it to cafeterias or continue with current plans to more than double its size to around 600 schools by 2014-15. The board unanimously picked that third option.

SEIU Local 99, whose members include 900 district cafeteria workers, took up the cause, holding a series of rallies to gin up support for the breakfast program that helps keep them employed. On Tuesday, several hundred purple-shirted SEIU members demonstrated outside district headquarters while the board heard pleas from workers and parents to save the program.

Tonya Chambers, who works at Hoover Elementary, said she's watched participation in the school's breakfast program more than double since it moved from the cafeteria to the classroom. And a mom who works the night shift at a Jack in the Box nearly cried as she described how her child has been doing better in school since BIC was introduced.

City Controller Wendy Greuel, who is running for mayor, told the board of her support for BIC. She encouraged other schools to follow the lead of Limerick Elementary in Canoga Park, whose principal has worked with staff and parents to create a program that works for everyone.

Board member Marguerite Poindexter LaMotte echoed that message, noting that all new programs have issues that need to be worked out and telling them, "Just straighten them out."

While board member Steve Zimmer asked that schools be given the opportunity to opt out, he also described the "humbling experience" of being told by a child that he wasn't getting enough to eat.

"We cannot pretend for a moment that this isn't our problem," said Zimmer, a former high school teacher and counselor. "This isn't a problem that's instead of education. This is education.

"This is part and parcel of what education is in the midst of the Great Recession."

The board also voted 5-2 to ban suspensions for so-called willful defiance, the refusal by students to turn in assignments, bring materials to class and similar deliberate and disrespectful behavior. The ban was part of the School Climate Bill of Rights, which calls for using mediation and intervention rather than suspensions to change student behavior.

The resolution was opposed by Valley board member Tamar Galatzan, a mom and career prosecutor, and board member LaMotte, who told the kids, "There's no pass on disrespect."

But other board members heeded pleas from board President Monica Garcia and Deasy, who talked about the disproportionately high number of male black students kicked out of class for defiance.

"We want to be part of graduation, not incarceration," he said. "This allows students to make amends in some way that is not just going home."

Board member Richard Vladovic, who represents the South Bay, gave his reluctant OK to the measure, expressing concern that disruptive kids were hurting opportunities for their classmates.

During the discussion of student discipline, hundreds of students from schools around the district rallied outside. Their demonstration competed with one scheduled by UTLA, whose chief, Warren Fletcher, called on the board to raise teacher pay for the first time in seven years.

The 60-plus-item agenda - which had backup materials totaling 800 pages - included a discussion of Gov. Jerry Brown's budget revision, with Deasy saying the district is relying heavily on approval of the so-called Local Control Funding Formula, which provides additional money for high-poverty districts like LAUSD.

The board set a special meeting for 5-7 p.m. June 4 to discuss the district's proposed budget for 2013-14.

In other action, the board:

• Approved applications for nine schools in the San Fernando Valley to convert this fall to affiliated charters, allowing them to continue receiving services from the district while gaining more control over their budgets, schedules and curriculum. They are Calahan, Calvert, Chandler, Darby, Emelita and Granada elementary schools; and Chatsworth, Cleveland and Taft high schools.

• Authorized spending $4.2 million to add 29 officers to the LAUSD School Police force. The officers will be deployed to new schools that have been built across the district.

• Approved $1.4 million for KLCS-TV, the district-operated PBS station, to keep its funding at current levels for the next school year. The loss of federal grants would have meant reductions in programing without the infusion of district money.

• Signed off on a $1-a-year lease for 3 acres of city-owned land at Van Nuys Airport, which will allow the district to continue operating its aircraft mechanics school. The facility had been threatened with closure in July, when its rent was slated to double to $12,000 a month.